$10,000
Prize Announced by Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel in Conjunction
with the Publication of

(Text of the
Prize Offering fixed in December 2004; Webpage formatting updated
February 2007)

Prize Announcement

Turn
up just one Indus inscription that contains at least
50 symbols distributed in the outwardly random-appearing
ways typical of true scripts contemporary to the Indus
system, and we will (1) declare our model to be falsified
and (2) will write a check to the discoverer or discoverers
for $10,000.

Ground
rules: Due to the many forgeries associated with the
130-year-old Indus-script thesis (see, e.g., Witzel
and Farmer 2000; Farmer 2003), before becoming a
candidate for the prize the inscription (1) must
be clearly provenanced from a known Indus archaeological
site and (2) must be accepted as genuine by a consensus
of recognized Indus researchers.

The
offer, backed by an anonymous donor, is good throughout
Farmer's lifetime.

See
further "A Note on Falsification" (p. 48 in our paper,
reproduced at the end of this page).

For
an example of what we mean by 'random-appearing' sign duplications,
see the Linear Elamite inscription (which contains roughly 50
signs) compared below with the longest known Indus inscription
(which contains 17 non-repeating signs). Similar examples can
be provided from other contemporary scripts:

Like
inscriptions in all true scripts from the late 3rd millennium
BCE, this Linear Elamite inscription contains a great
deal of random-appearing sign repetition, which in this
case is an apparent 'marker' of high levels of sound
coding:

The
longest Indus inscription on one surface (M-314a) is
typical of Indus inscriptions in consisting predominantly
of non-repeating high-frequency signs (measured in the
corpus as a whole). (Note that no sign repetitions at
all occur in this particular inscription, although at
least 10 of the highest frequency Indus signs show up
in it.) The contrast with Linear Elamite is extreme.

For
a full discussion of anomalous sign frequencies in
the Indus corpus, see Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel (2004:
26-38).

It
will probably surprise many readers to discover that the standard
view that the Indus civilization was literate has been an assumption
and not a conclusion of previous studies. While debate over the
language of Indus inscriptions has had a long and acrimonious
history, not one of the thousands of articles or books written
on the topic since the 1870s included any systematic justification
for the belief that the inscriptions were in fact linguistic.

The
claim that historical fields follow methods different from those
of other sciences is still frequently repeated. Given the political
abuses to which history is subject, we consider this to be a
dangerous claim, and believe that the same rigor must be demanded
in history as in any other scientific field. With
this in mind, in closing we would like to acknowledge the heuristic
nature of our work and briefly consider some conceivable conditions
under which it might be overturned.

Specifically,
we would consider that our model of Indus symbols was falsified,
or at least subject to serious modification, if any of the
following conditions were fulfilled:

1.
If remnants were discovered of an Indus inscription on any medium,
even if imperfectly preserved, that contained clear evidence
that the original contained several hundred signs;

2. If any Indus inscription carrying at least 50 symbols were found that
contained unambiguous evidence of the random-looking types of sign duplications
typical of ancient scripts;

3. If any bilingual inscription were discovered that carried a minimum of
30 or so Indus symbols juxtaposed with a comparable number of signs in a
previously deciphered script;

4.
If a clear set of rules were published that allowed any researcher,
besides the original proposer of those rules, to decipher a significantly
large body of Indus inscriptions using phonetic, syntactic, and
semantic principles of no greater number or complexity than those
needed to interpret already deciphered scripts;

5.
If a ‘lexical list’ were discovered that arranged
a significantly large number of Indus signs in ways similar to
those found in Near Eastern school texts.

Due
to the long record of doctored evidence and forgery that is part
of the Indus-script story (cf., e.g., Witzel and Farmer 2000, Farmer
2003), any discoveries of this type would have to be accepted by
a broad consensus of Indus researchers before we would consider
our model to be falsified or subject to major modification. We
would like to conclude that while we consider it highly improbable
that any of these five discoveries will ever be made, we would
welcome them if they were, since when considered alongside the
many anomalies in the Indus symbol system, any of those discoveries
would necessarily trigger a radical rethinking of current views
of early writing systems.